Elastic City

Elastic City intends to make its audience active participants in an ongoing poetic exchange with the places we live in and visit.

Artists are commissioned by Elastic City to create their own walks. These walks tend to focus less on providing factual information and more on heightening our awareness, exploring our senses and making new group rituals in dialogue with public space.

We are now in our third season of presenting participatory walks by artists throughout and outside of New York. With this season, over 50 artists will have led walks in New York, Detroit, San Francisco, Berlin, Buenos Aires, London, Paris, Reykjavik and São Paulo.

As part of our educational program, Elastic City now offers "ways." Whereas a walk provides the opportunity to participate in a narrative series of poetic moments, a way explicitly engages participants in *how* to generate these moments through exercises, tools and techniques offered by Elastic City artists. In a way, participants gather in an intimate group to prompt exchange, tone the gut and sharpen poetic decision-making. Elastic City ways typically do not involve walking and are offered outdoors unless otherwise noted.

Elastic City has partnered with numerous organizations to co-present its walks and ways, including The Abrons Art Center, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Brooklyn Flea, Friends of the High Line, Le Petit Versailles, Museum of the City of New York, Printed Matter's NY Art Book Fair, Open House NY, Pratt Institute, Residency Unlimited, SculptureCenter, Wave Hill and Urban Design Week.

Elastic City is directed by Todd Shalom. He realized the idea while suffering from altitude sickness in Cusco, Peru.